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AMD probably has less developers working on the Linux driver. Their development is basically, fix it when it breaks. nVidia probably looks for signs of deprecation and fixes kernel bugs early. The only problems they get are things that are changed silently while fglrx doesn't work anyway.

I like to compare it to backing up a disk daily and replacing the drive when there are signs of new unreliability.

AMD seems to be the type that waits for the drive to stop writing and reading reliability, take the system down, send off their drive to the nearest recovery plant, and one month later you can begin using your server once all the data has been recovered.

That's the life you get when you use the newest stable kernel with AMD's Linux drivers.

^^^^^ x1000!!!! if you are stuck with a laptop with an ATI card in it.

I wouldn't buy any new laptop with an ATI card in it!

At least, on the desktop, you have options... 'can experiment with an ATI card and if you're unsatisfied, you have options.

I would like to say, that my choice for next laptop four months ago was Intel + ATI! And this was due to nVidia not solving power management problems with my previous laptop. I had really hard time with them, especially powermizer not changing levels fast enough but mainly this was due to stupid beeps, long waits when resuming from hibernate. More then 2 minutes were spent just on nothing, laptop was dead not doing anything - black screen, no HDD leds blinking and it beeps 3 times in between for no reason, kernel logs were reporting some spinlocks or so... And that was happening for period of 2 years. I had written long posts on nvnews, tried countless workarounds and nothing helped till the day I just received this new laptop with ATI, the lucky day

And guess what, no problems with powermizer, no problems with power management at all, hibernates are fast, suspend works, opengl is good, multiple monitors works, everything I need JUST WORKS like a charm! I would never go back to nVidia for laptop unless they show me that there are no problems with PM and proove me that ATI sucks
One thing that doesn't work for me is fast user switching, it just dies when second session is logged out

So, please get patches and don't act like trolls...
Also, I'm kinda lucky using ArchLinux, as there is AUR which does build catalyst with patches for me, I don't have to do anything by hand
I wish ATI to continue improving things...

Grab and run http://kanotix.com/files/install-fglrx-debian.sh to avoid worrying about these issues, but you have to be running (preferably) Kanotix, or Debian, or Ubuntu. It might work on derivatives like Mint, too. AFAIK it's tested to some degree on Kanotix and the latest release of Ubuntu.

Note: the above script is by Phoronix member "Kano", who afaik is the lead developer of the Kanotix distro. Although he is vocal about many valid problems with fglrx, he also seems to have a great system in place for hacking the driver's open source bits to work with new kernels and userspaces. This is really a great thing, that we have someone making it easy for the rest of us.

if you are such a noob that you can not follow the threads and postings everywhere that you have to patch something, you are too much of a noob to use anything but a distro kernel.

What a load of rubbish. I've been rolling custom kernels for years and never have these problems with NVidia, the ati drivers are not kept as up to date anywhere near enough as they should be, ati should go check out nvidia's work in that area. And depending on the distro, some distros use the newer 2.6.3X line of kernels (which apparently ATI dont support according to some here), which the ATI drivers rarely install correctly for unless patches are applied, and to make it worse, it's not even the company that developed the driver releasing the patches, it's either a distro committer or some volunteer. Sorry but that's pathetic.

Why is it the Nvidia installer never stuffs up and can cope with anything newer than a 2.6.28 kernel without having to screw around with patches, oh that's right, only noobs use installers that work, the elitists enjoy creating symlinks in the kernel source tree to make things backwards compatible with the fglrx source code and having to apply community developed patches to get a driver developed by a huge corporation to actually install properly.

i want to make one thing clear, the actual ati drivers *when* installed work well and the performance is great. thats not where my issue is with ati, it's with their installer+kernel module. They are really letting themselves down with the way things are at the moment.

i want to make one thing clear, the actual ati drivers *when* installed work well and the performance is great. thats not where my issue is with ati, it's with their installer+kernel module. They are really letting themselves down with the way things are at the moment.

don't use the ati installer. packages are already provided by your distribution that are supported and well-tested. for example, i co-maintain the debian fglrx-driver package, and the patch to support 2.6.34 was applied a couple days after 2.6.34 was released. so, if you're getting the driver the "right" way, you will not have the trouble caused by ati's hack of an installer.

AMD appears to be a strictly amateur hour operation, and they still don't get it that you can have great hw but if your drivers suck know will know or care excepting a few fanbois.

This is why I'll NEVER buy another AMD product, well maybe CPUs if they get their ---- together on per-core performance o.w. I'm perfectly willing to stick to nVidia and Intel.

Just for lulz, remember a few years ago when the AMD fanbois were laughing their ---es off at Intel for pushing core clock rates? Now who's pushing them? (I actually owned AMD CPUs at this time just because they had a superior per-core performance over then Pentium variations, i.e. pre-Core.)

^^^^^ x1000!!!! if you are stuck with a laptop with an ATI card in it.

I wouldn't buy any new laptop with an ATI card in it!

At least, on the desktop, you have options... 'can experiment with an ATI card and if you're unsatisfied, you have options.

Yeah, if you INSIST on experimenting with an ATI GPU do it with, at first, a cheap/free preferably semi-recent second hand GPU on a desktop.

Why? While most modern notebook you can use various MXM GPU card you will also likely need a new heatsink mfg/ODM MAY have them o.w. you'll need to fabricate one. Also MXM GPUs are incredibly expensive for what they are.